In the news today, a Norwegian far right Christian has killed at least 84 people by dressing up as a policeman and blasting away at an island youth resort. It's beyond depressing that one person can cause that much misery. Went for a coffee in Cafe Nero - no toilets, so had to visit Liverpool Street. One of the cleaner stations. A plaque on the wall commemorates the successful refurbishment on 1992. Now the trains are hidden away (could they do without them?) and the place has become a hanging garden of commerce with pigeon skewers on all the fixtures. Toilets cost 30p. Number 25 bus to Stratford. Pass the university and a sculpture relief with a person reading a book: “Unto This Last”. It is a line from the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: “Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee,” referring to Jesus’ equal wage policy. More likely a reference to Ruskin’s 1860 essay of the same name, which dealt with ideas like a basic living wage and the destructive effects of capitalism on the natural world. A nice segue into the utopian folly that is now Stratford Olympic Village. From the bus, we could see a huge stadium, and a spiral tower growing like a plant alongside. Stratford bus and train station are now bigger, but dwarfed, as is the Stratford shopping centre, by the new Westfield shopping complex (biggest in Europe), a giant set of monogrammed boxes (Westfield, M&S...). Iain Sinclair is right: the whole place has been given over to visionless developers to sell back and forth until the land price bears no relation to its value, and noone can afford to live on it any more. That’s the long-term plan anyway. The next stage, post Olympics, is going to be an abandoned sculpture park, with a slowly spreading contagion of graffiti tags and knotweed. Europe’s largest white elephant.
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